The Dodo Archive

Happy Milk: When Big Pharma Meets Big Farming

A few days ago I wrote about the connection between the pharmaceutical industry and animal agriculture. The gist of the piece was that there's so much animal flesh to keep healthy that eating animals is implicit support for an industry that already makes too much money over-medicating humans.

Since then, I've realized there's another angle to this topic, one that's more sinister, one that I missed. An article on The Cattle Site reveals that the pharmaceutical industry is interested in more than antibiotics and vaccines. It's also using animal welfare as a pretext to market new drugs for farm animals.

Leading the charge to sell drugs that will create a calmer cow is Merck. Recently the company announced the launch of "Creating Connections." According to The Cattle Site, it's "a new program designed to help producers better understand cattle behavior and use that knowledge to employ strategies that can reduce stress, improve reproduction and foster stronger immune responses."

In other words, Merck has found a way to exploit welfare washing for profit. The idea here is that you drug the beasts into a stupor so they don't express feelings of distress and in turn-the real motive-cooperate with their executioners. This is a tactic that makes life easier for ranchers and meatpacking plant workers while making Merck look like it's in league with the Humane Society as a steward of animals.

But it's a bad joke. The piece explains, "Since calmer cattle are easier to examine, diagnose, treat and move, the techniques shared through Creating Connections will help make it easier for producers to improve the health of their herds."

As is to be expected, asinine blather has poured forth to justify these happy drugs. "The behavior of cattle – how they interact with each other and with people – can be shaped by positive interactions with caregivers, and tell us a tremendous amount about how cattle are feeling," said Tom Noffsinger, D.V.M., a consulting feedyard veterinarian well known for his work on low-stress cattle handling practices.

It's not about lowering stress, but hiding it. You hook cows' udders to milk pumping machines, send their babies to the meat counter as veal chops, and turn them into hamburger when production declines. But because you have drugged the cows into oblivion they don't seem to mind, and so you can work more efficiency, not to mention less burdened by the suspicion that you're doing something very wrong.

But come on. If it's welfare that we're really concerned about, here's something to consider: don't bring these creatures into existence in the first place. There will be no suffering to medicate if you just use your resources to grow flora rather than fauna. Otherwise, spare us the welfare talk.